Here is a beautiful video made by ItoWorld that shows the progress of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project during 2008. Those who don’t know OSM, should take notice of the exponential growth of this data source. Contrary to NAVTEQ (which provides geospatial data to almost all online services, including Google Maps, Yahoo, MapQuest, and Microsoft Virtual Earth), the content of OSM is free, open source, and largely user-generated.
I think that in the near future, bottom-up projects like this will replace the top-down commercial data sets, similarly to the way that Wikipedia has replaced online reference material. The paradigm has the advantage of numbers, making it more possible to keep up-to-date with the changing global landscape.
The official call for works is available for the Pure Data Convention 2009. You may recall that the previous Pd Convention took place in Montreal in the summer of 2007, and that I gave a talk, workshop, and performed a piece.
As you might know, my main colleague and research collaborator who works with me in the design of 3D musical interfaces is Zack Settel. In summer of 2008, he produced Blairatta Policeme, a volumetric concert piece for jazz trio, mobile chamner quartet, and audio-enhanced performance space. See his documentation for more about what this means. On that site, you’ll find a live recording by the CBC, as well as an excellent video that explains the main concepts.
Also most recently, Zack appears in a video interview (seulement en français) on the on the Télé-Québec site. In fact, you can also see me in some of the shots, apparently doing “research”.
The call for NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) has been posted for next year’s conference, which will be held at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. More details at www.nime2009.org. The submission deadline for most items is January 24th, 2009.
As a collaboration between the SAT and Mobile Muse, we have created a component that allows visual artists to collect media content from their audiences during live events. The project is called RawMaterials, and is targetted at VJs using Modul8 for mixing, yet any software capable of receiving OSC messages can be used. Audience members can use their cell phones or other mobile devices to send SMS, MMS, microblob feeds such as Twitter, and even live video using Livecast software. The public can also upload content to social media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, etc., and the system can be configured to aggregate content from those sources as well. This can even happen far before the event starts, so that the public can choose the raw materials that will be used during the performance.
I went to a meeting on Friday to discuss the development of a standard for describing spatial audio, called SpatDIF. There is now an official website and mailing list, so go check it out at www.spatdif.org.
The idea is quite nice, because it allows one to separate the contents of the 3D scene from the audio renderer. All that is required is to format messages for sound source positions and directivity in this OSC-style format:
Then, any SpatDIF-compatible renderer will be able to spatialize the sounds on the particular audio display that it is written for (eg, binaural, 5.1 surround, VBAP, Ambisonics, etc).
In the summer of 2008, we developed a prototype of a multi-player mobile audio game, called SoundPark. The objective of the game was to collect audio clips that were physically scattered throught the real world, and deposit them in a staging area for playback. Central to the design are the themes of highly coupled interaction and communication between players with different roles and an engaging blend of interaction with both the physical and virtual worlds. To this end, numerous technologies including locative sensing, miniature computing, and portable displays had to be integrated with a game middleware and audio scene rendering engine.
I’ve written a much more detailed description on audioscape.org if you are interested, but here is a little documentation video that we put together to illustrate the concepts:
From May 13-15, I was at the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna, which turned out to be a great forum for the exchange of ideas related to sonic design in mobile settings. There is a nice book published, which includes all the proceedings from this workshop since 2004. So rather than telling you about all of the projects, I’ll urge you to go to mobilemusicworkshop.org and buy one of these books
As for the poster that I presented, click the thumbnail below to see the larger version:
My main activity is the development and programming for the Audioscape Project, which involves anything to do with spatial organization of audio content and sound processing. Generally speaking, we provide the ability to create virtual worlds that function as musical interfaces or installation.
Most recently, however, we have started to add the ability to include mobile and location-based environments, in the outdoors. By using tiny mobile computing devices, GPS, and ad-hoc wireless audio streaming, we have managed to create shared mixed-reality audio environments that multiple users can experience while roaming around outdoors.
On March 11th, 2008, I presented our mobile audio work at Interface[s] Montreal, which is a conference series held each year at the SAT. The theme for this night’s presentations was “Mobility”, and so I talked about the future use of audio in augmented- and mixed-reality applications.
